Perron Street residents woke up to the sight of a trash mountain Friday after a garbage truck’s load caught fire on their doorstep.
St. Albert fire crews responded to a garbage truck fire on Perron St. near St. Thomas St. at about 6:13 a.m. Feb. 28, St. Albert fire prevention officer Michael Bos said in an email.
The driver of a Waste Management garbage truck called the fire department after spotting signs of a fire coming from the truck’s load, said David Mitchell, a city transportation worker who helped with the post-fire clean-up.
Crews extinguished the fire with water and foam and told the driver to dump the rest of the trash onto the street in front of 7 Perron St. to make sure it was completely out, Bos said.
Crews closed about a third of Perron St. to traffic for a few hours and used a vacuum truck to suck up firefighting foam. A front-end loader scooped the trash into about six dump-trucks for shipment to Roseridge Landfill.
“It was pretty close to a full load,” Mitchell said, and the trash pile was nearly as big as the garbage truck itself.
The trash appeared to be mostly inorganic in nature, with several used oil containers, a busted bookshelf and many black trash bags visible. It was not particularly fragrant.
Vince LePan said city crews were already on scene scooping up the mess when he arrived at work at 7 Perron St. at about 7:50 a.m.
“At first I thought someone had just dumped it just as a vandalism thing,” he said, but crews quickly explained the situation to him.
LePan gave city crews kudos for their swift response, and said this was just about the strangest thing he’d seen happen downtown in 30 years.
Bos said no injuries were reported from the fire, the cause of which was still under investigation. He asked residents to help prevent trash fires by properly disposing of household and commercial products.
